Assessment of global warming impact on biodiversity using the extinction risk index in LCIA: a case study of Japanese plant species

Purpose There has been an increasing number of studies on species extinctionbecause of global warmingbased on estimations of changes in species distributions. Life cycle impact assessmentmethods do not have a biodiversity damage factor for global warmingthat uses the extinctionrisk index. In this study, a method for determining the extinctionrisks of individual species per unit CO2 emission was proposed and test calculations of the extinctionrisks of 216 species of Japanese vascular plantswere performed. We also examined the possibility of determining local and global extinctionrisk factors using this method.